Author: Chris La Porte

Chris is a writer, co-host of The Brothers Geek podcast, and wanna-be Hobbit. He loves examining the storytelling elements of movies and video games while drinking the darkest stout he can find. He especially loves Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and anything made for the N64. He also has more MRxL than you, just accept it.

As you probably know by now, Disney has absorbed another major entertainment company into its hive mind collective, gaining access to a plethora of new franchises, rights, and assets from 21stCentury Fox. Is this a good thing? That’s up for debate, and the length of that article would warrant an entirely different entry to the Nerdbot stream here. What it comes down to is whether you believe Disney can make good new entries to the franchises that we love from this merger. The most cynical would say that the merger will continue the monopolization of entertainment and movies will continue…

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Why do we fall, Master Bruce? So we can learn to pick ourselves back up. So, that doesn’t have the same impact as it does when Michael Caine is speaking specifically to Batman, or at least someone named Bruce, but the idea behind it remains. No Man’s Sky is infamous for the amount of hate it got when it was first released. It failed to come close to deliver on a very big idea that you could explore a vast galaxy full of wonders and something new was around every corner. Instead, we got the same kind of brown, kind of…

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Ah, the radiant light of Comic-Con has been shed upon all of us. There’s so much news it’s almost impossible to keep up with it all. Social media feeds are now filled with all the best Quailman cosplay and, most importantly, we now have 107 new trailers of every nerdy movie you could possibly want. Most of those center around the biggest money makers: the superhero movies. Nothing gets butts in seats like someone having some kind of super ability that will probably level cities as collateral damage. They begin each tale discovering their powers, having to rectify them with…

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Dungeons and Dragons is a game where friends sit around the table and play a mostly audio, imagination-fueled, game that has no winners. The only competition comes from trying to do the most creative, funny, badass thing you can through roleplaying an entirely fictional character of your own creation. To put that into a podcast format and make it something so beloved that you sell out entire theaters just so people can watch you do that is something of a rare gift. The McElroy brothers and their dad (loving called daddy by three grown-ass men) have made a living out…

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At some point, there was a first time we all saw Star Wars. There’s a calm as the “A long time ago…” text sets the stage for your journey into a galaxy far far away. Then, you’re blasted .5 past light speed by John Williams’ score and the giant text speeding away into the stars. If that doesn’t get your attention, then you really are lost. I had the privilege of seeing the Nashville Symphony perform the music of the movie as it played on the big screen. I know most of the Nerdbot base of operations lies in sunny…

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By now, we all know that Amazon decided that Aragorn was too damn perfect to not get his own show, or at least one season. He’s rugged, he sings, he tosses dwarves, he does it all! (I would pay all the money for that action figure.) Any Lord of the Rings fan knows he represents a long and complicated history of Gondor, the largest kingdom of men, in the Tolkien universe—Tolkienverse? He represents a line of Kings long thought to be lost, and a future for Gondor free of a dark and hard-fought past. Gondor’s history has all kinds of…

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Jurassic Park holds a special place in a lot of people’s hearts. It’s Steven Spielberg, dinosaurs and Jeff Goldblum’s chest; what more could you ask for? It’s been a long road since the original movie, filled with mostly lows, and by the time dinosaurs are finally terrorizing people, you forgot why you cared in the first place. As a friend put it for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, “I don’t know how you make a movie with dinosaurs attacking people boring, but boy they did it.” Our Nerdbot review said much of the same. What has happened to our favorite genetically modifying, dinosaur nomming,…

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It’s that time of year again. Movie lovers are posting their top ten lists, making their Oscar predictions, and trying to sound cool because they saw that offbeat movie their favorite obscure film podcast mentioned once. In a time of such fond remembrance, it’s easy to forget the need to celebrate the terrible movies. No human beings (or robots) celebrate bad movies as wholeheartedly as the creators, hosts, and writers of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Over the years they have seen some of the worst movies ever to be created and never gave up their quest to make fun of…

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It’s a new year with all the hope, determination, and resolutions that come with entering the year of the doggo. What will this year bring? World peace? The cure for the common cold? Finally a way to decide what to have for dinner? That would be all well and good, but I just want good video games. Specifically, I would love to have some amazing single player, story immersive, character forward RPG experiences. Because of all my new year’s resolutions, the most important is sinking ungodly amounts of time into a fictional universe that does nothing but distract me from…

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Why are you a nerd? I mean, why do you like nerdy, geeky stuff? Comic books, science fiction, old English writers who create their own languages, and swords that seal darkness, all of these appeal to you, don’t they? Well, some, at least. If you have ever been made fun of at any time in your life because of your choice of fandom, you probably had this question brought front and center. “Why am I a nerd?” Looking back at 2017, and all the movies, video games, and television that splashed in front of our imaginations might reveal something deeper…

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